The Rains
For Ben Ayers

i.
Perched on the roof, book in hand
He never heard the kite
Until she was upon him
Apparition from the gaping blue
That, taking him perhaps for a hitchhiker,
Latched her talons onto his extended thumb
the message clear as skies
after a hard rain: come on
relinquish your mass
So that when he failed to wing up out
Of his chair, off mortal ground
The brown bird wheeled around
Hovering on steady wingbeats
Not a dozen feet away
And fixed him with her yellow gaze.

ii.
The girl finds playing cards. Bustling down
Market Street, she can’t help but find
The Jack of Hearts wedged under a standpipe.
Not two days later it’s an ace, clubs this time,
Followed shortly by a diamond four. No fool
To ignore such signs, key plot twists in The Story
She quietly stoops to collect the winking red and black
And white faces. Tucks them neatly into her wallet.
For--future reference? routine inference?
A source of some distress, then, to come here
And find entire decks strewn carelessly
Cards face up and down, soaked and tattered,
Wasted bits of storyline,
Sheer potential overwhelmed
With wantonness. By early afternoon
The rains come and wash the evidence away.

iii.
In second grade mother’s mother died
Leaving a grandmother-shaped hole.
Genny knew. She would stir
Her pots of black beans and collards
Magic dishes I can’t stop tasting
Head wrapped in clean white cloth
She scrubbed the floors of our long apartment
Like no one has before or since
Never learning the name of our second,
Terrified cat: Proust’s Morel and Charlus
Scarred products of a lab and a Bronx deli
Portuguese’d to Moralio and the white one.
Stirring heavy, fragrant pots she absorbed
The news from mother with, I imagine,
Barely a nod. I know, dear. Sound of rainfall.
City noises. She passed me in the hall.

Endangered Species of Ayurved

Top image: Bishunath Karmacharya, traditional baidya and head of the Banepa Ayurveda Sangh (association). He wants to pass the tradition on and is willing to teach anyone willing to learn, at no cost. On the floor in front of him is a box of Yarchagumba.

Lower image: Keshab Baidya, a traditional Ayurvedic doctor/pharmacist in Banepa, Nepal. With his son pursuing a different career, Keshab is the last of his lineage. Above his right shoulder, a jar of shuddha paro, purified mercury, is visible.



Yesterday I took a long-overdue trip to Banepa, a sleepy Newar town slowly transforming itself into a modern city. In other words, it’s a lot like what Kathmandu must have been like in the seventies. The main strip, all that most tourists ever see of the place, is all traffic and bustle, with the usual assortment of shops, fruit peddlers, pan-spitters, etc. But head ten yards off this long, straight, dusty thoroughfare and you’re in another world of quiet brick-paved streets and brick-and-woodwork houses. Ducks puttering around the streets, and women scrubbing sudsy clothes just outside their doorways.
My mission was to meet with a couple of the old-timer Baidyas I’d met once or twice before, men who still practice (or if not, still know how to practice) rasa shastra. They work with minerals, metals, and animal parts like deer musk glands and conch shells as well as countless herbs from India and from the Himalayas. They are clinicians, too, but what separates them from so many other practitioners is their skill and knowledge of medicine-making. The first baidya I sought was Keshab Baidya (his last name indicating that his family have been Ayurvedic doctors for generations). I’d spent a wonderful couple of days with him during the winter watching him make medicine and tend to the few patients who came into his pharmacy-room, crowded with hundreds of jars of raw ingredients and finished compounds. This time I went straight up the back way to his herb room and got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach when I saw it was cleaned up, practically empty. Could he have fallen ill and died so suddenly in a few short months . . .? A possibility that seemed all the more real and disturbing because of the recent, sudden passing of another old man I had loved, on the other side of the world. But going around to the main entrance of his house, I was greeted by his daughter-in-law who explained the herb room had just been moved down a few flights. My worries weren’t entirely unfounded, though: Keshab-ji wasn’t well. He was suffering from a failing heart. The move was to make it easier to access his work without having to climb up flights of stairs. Just now he was resting, and I sat amongst the hundreds, thousands of plastic jars and waited for him to appear. When he finally did I barely recognized him. It was his presence more than any specific physical characteristic that had changed: he seemed such a thinner, slighter figure than the engaged, lively man I remembered. After exchanging 'namaste's we just sat there, not exactly looking at each other but acutely aware of each others' presence, for a good 5 minutes. Something in the man’s eyes had changed, too—instead of a lively sparkle there was a dull sadness, a sense of resignation. It wasn’t hard to guess what this might be about. Finally he broke the silence by asking me, in his typical style, 'what would you give for hepatitis B?' I'm never sure when he does this if he's quizzing me or if he’s genuinely curious what herbs a foreign ‘baidya’ would use. But somehow, that's what I seem to be both to him and to another, salty baidya I’ve been hanging out with. Not a peer, really, but in some sense one of their own. The salty baidya, Shyam Man Shrestha, referred to me recently as a 'kaviraj,' an almost embarrassingly high compliment meaning something like 'king of doctors.' Then yesterday dear old Keshab Baidya said in Newari, when another old Newari man came in gestured at me, grunting a question, that I was an "American who knows everything about herbs." This is hardly true either, but the thing that really struck me yesterday is I may be the closest these old baidyas have to an apprentice, someone to carry on the tradition. And i'm very far from that, really. But in Keshab's case it's so clear that that is what's missing, the next generation. That’s what’s behind the dullness in his gaze, the resignation in his movements. Eventually I broached the subject with him by asking if the boy I'd seen once helping him by grinding some herbs was still coming. Nope, not really . . . all of sudden he said straight out, “after I go, my kids'll wait a few years maybe and then they'll say, ‘look at this mess, we could put this room to a better use . . . and they’ll throw it all away. All this tens of laakhs worth of medicine.’” There’s no one to carry it on.
One of the reasons i'd come back was to buy some bhasmas and other medicines from him to bring home. I didn't want to suddenly start talking business, but I brought it up by asking what he thought the most important bhasmas and non-perishable medicines were. We compiled a list of 10 or so things (shankha, abhrak and mandur bhasmas, shilajit, some guggulus . . .), and I said I would like to buy them from him. He told me to give him a week before I come and pick up what he puts together for me. Leaving his place, having arranged this, I felt some of the weight of tradition settle on my shoulders, and let me tell you it was a strange feeling. I have a chance to carry on parts of their lineage, in however small a way. Later, at the Nawaranga guest house in Dhulikhel amongst people who feel after 8 months like old friends, thinking about the whole scene with Keshab brought a tear to my eye. I could feel the pain of this old man, bearer of such a proud and venerable tradition, watching it come to a dead end.
Of course Ayurveda is not in danger of dying. By some estimations it may be more popular than ever. But it’s losing it’s old-growth, it’s deepest-rooted lineages, as the younger generation pursues easier, more lucrative and more prestigious occupations. In flirting with the New Age it is in danger of severing its links with the past.
For my Ayurvedic student friends: there is still an opportunity in Banepa to come and learn the techniques of classical rasa shastra hands-on. Bishunath Karmacharya, a first-rate baidya, is willing to teach whoever wants to learn, for free. The catch is that he has no longer has a workshop. An interested group of students, though, could come to Nepal and study medicine-making intensively for months with a rare teacher for little more than the cost of building a rudimentary workshop/lodging (plus food and airfare of course). If anyone is interested in such a possibility, contact me!

final day of panchakarma--
blessed and decked out with a massive mala (flower garland), tika, and bhadgaole topi (bhatapur-style cap), i'm thanking Roma didi, who cooked almost every meal for me for 25 days

surrendering to verse

is a fair description. having caught the poetry bug (from the likes of my mother, I suspect--a hereditary susceptibility) I find myself uninterested, for the time being, in prose.


Rainy morning in Sipadol

In this monsoon deferred, hard to avoid the feeling
It should have rained harder, or not at all.
Not wrong to look for drama in the weather
And scorn the steady drizzle that breeds
Fibonacci series of cups of milkless tea
and games of scrabble.

Pole of this place, the towering Pipal
Danced to the tune of the breaking storm
Creaking bows flash-illumined in violet
Greeting my sleep-muzzled head at 6:00.
Like an egg from the heavens it should have exploded,
this 'weather event', in a goo of white and yolk, shard of shell.
Messy little encapsulation of life & death
And the embryo-smudge shades between.
Instead I sip my tea, hot and gingery
As the albumin drips down, static, numb
Onto the village spared and cheated of
The fecund violence, its due.


What gods

soft, dusty feet find their way
to a shrine in the woods
what gods of this place
I know not
simple stones massively tika’d
stick of incense wedged between old bricks
a naked lightbulb miraculously lit
its wire snaking away through the trees
bells and vermillion


Kathmandu scenes

An unearthly blossoming
Purple of play-doh or steaming entrails
On tree after urban tree
Makes me question my vision:
Maybe a sensory fuse is blown
And the grass isn’t really
That flat green, either—an improbable color.
And sky? Shell grey?
I doubt.

But less likely things have happened
Here in Kathmandu. Just last week
I merged with an orange crowd
Everyone dusted with the fine powder
by mid-morning
ringing in the new year
and taking the gods out for a stroll on careening palanquins
under twirling parasols ornate as tiny lawn mushrooms
and stealing my wallet.

Not long ago I glimpsed, from the corner of my eye,
An old woman, wrinkled and browned
Sitting implacably on the sidewalk
Trimming her toenails with a buck-knife.
Really? This is double-take material, after all
And I look again, or never stop looking,
Until my foot finds a foot-sized hole in the street
My right leg vanishes to the thigh
Into the Baluwa Tar gutter.
Unsheathing myself from the gunky trap
I’m missing some shin-skin
(Traded in for grit-shit).
But I get to keep the fish-shaped scar,
Memento of the time this inscrutable city
Tried to swallow me.


The Pines

The pines were calling. Too many words.

I strode, rubber-shod, up the dirt track
Past sprouting maize and cucumber trellises
Awaiting tendrils’ curl

Past the quiet rhythmic work
Of threshing grain

Past cud-chewing cattle

To the dusty road etched into the hillside
Remnants of field terraces still discernible
A vertical labyrinth blanketed in long, rusty pine needles
Slippery underfoot
And smelling sweetly of decay

Perched on that dry-slippery slope
I squatted, dug in my heels

There’s nothing to tell:
Wind and sun
And thoughts like doves
Quiet but insistent
Taking flight

I came down from that high place
Past cabbages and incipient beans
Rubber sandals in hand
Dust between my toes
Still trailing words.


Three Ayurvedic Riddles

Ojas

The essence
Lube of life
White-gold as ghee
Sweet as honey
Fragrant as paddy
Eight drops only


Tejas

Finest fire’s
Subtle refiner
Keeper’s finder
Luster-miner


Prana

Flash
without sound
Signal
no ground
Breath
all around

Official Disclaimer

Due to a juicy new tidbit of U.S. policy, I have been prompted to make the following clarification with regard to the nature of this weblog:

*that contrary to all appearances, Ill Wind is not a U.S. Department of State or Fulbright Program website.

*that any similarity in content between the views expressed here and official U.S. Government foreign policy is purely coincidental.

*that all views expressed here are my own, except where attributed to others or vaguely plagiarized from the cybermind stream of consciousness to which I may be susceptible.

I hope this clears up any confusion that may have been plaguing the hearts and minds of my readers.

Of Pickpockets, Oil baths and Gundruk

This entry should have started with a nice big photo: the terraces and brick-makers’ yards on the path up to Sipadole, maybe, or the local polyculture of wheat and marijuana that I captured so nicely on film (well, silicon) the other day. For the last week I’ve been staying in Sipadole, a village on the Valley rim, a rural place despite its five-stones’-throw proximity to Bhaktapur’s moderate bustle. I’m there to do Panchakarma, the Ayurvedic cleansing regimen, and have only descended from my sequestration to restock reading material and attend a wedding on one of my designated ‘rest’ days. Rest means no massages or other intensely relaxing treatments. Rest, in this case, means plunging back into the grit and noise of the city and being pick-pocketed. It wasn’t my money this time: no, my mind’s eye was practically tucked into my pocket after having my wallet lifted in a crowd just a few weeks back at a Nepali New Year celebration. It was my digital camera, full of all the images I wanted to spread to the four winds. Gone from my backpack, whose outside pocket I found flapping open when I stepped off a micro ten minutes ago. I’d been busy with the shutter lately, and I was particularly excited about the images I’d taken of the puja to mark the beginning of my Panchakarma. Well, mark it up to the khuire (whitey) tax, the all-but-inevitable result of hundreds of pairs of eyes focusing on me and one or two probing hands seeing what I’m worth. I estimate I’ve been small-timed to the tune of 10% of my Fulbright stipend, counting the value of the camera. Of course, it’s not the money that bothers me the most—the thieves are probably justifying their actions with just this thought, that a few thousand rupees means little to me—but the blow to my respect for my fellow humans. I look back on this afternoon now through a glaze of mistrust: is that why the young couple on the microbus were laughing so hard, because they watched someone unzip my bag and lift out the compact piece of hardware? Was that part of what the little crowd that gathered as I kneeled on the street to have my palm read was up to? But it’s gone, along with my feeble but trusty headlamp. I hope they enjoy the photos of wild rose bushes and of Dr. Shrestha worshipping Dhanwantari and blessing my medicated ghee.

But I was going to write about Panchakarma. In Ayurveda all treatment can be divided into shamana and shodhana. Shamana is palliation, basically soothing the aggravated humors. Pacifying the yapping dog at the door. If you’ve got high Pitta, too much fire, ice cream might do the trick. Too much dryness as a result of Vata, wind, and grounding therapy like meditation or lying under weighted blankets can help. Heavy, damp kapha can be lightened up with vigorous exercise or spicy flavors. Ayurvedic thinking is quite literal. Shodhana, on the other hand, is about actually eliminating the doshas (humors) from the body--banishing them completely. Wind tends to collect in the colon first, as gas. To remove it, go to the source: do an oily enema. Pitta can take the form of hyperacidic gastric secretions, so purgation with laxatives dispels it. Kapha accumulates as phlegm in the chest region and stomach, and can be expelled by therapeutic vomiting. Panchakarma, which means ‘five actions,’ is a systematic combination of these three therapies, plus nasal administration and (in theory, at least) blood-letting.
But as Dr. Vasant Lad says, “you can’t squeeze the juice out of an unripe mango.” Before the elimination can begin, the body has to be properly prepared. In this preparatory stage, the doshas (vitiated humors; impurities) are coaxed from wherever they may be lodged in the tissues back into the mahasrotas (“great channel”), the digestive tract. This is accomplished largely by lubricating the body inside and out: the simple diet of khichari is augmented with lots of ghee (pure, clarified butterfat), and the daily regimen includes a full-body oil massage. This is the stage I have undergone recently, and after a few days of oiling people started to comment on my glow. Like an oil lamp, I thought. My tissues are softened and made supple, and I can picture the impurities slip-sliding their way back to the GI tract. They hardly know what’s coming. (Yesterday it came: kapha-annihilating vamana (vomiting) brought on by drinking a liter and half of salted sugarcane juice in about two minutes.)
In addition to the massage, there are two other oily therapies. One is netra basti, a sort of eyeball bath with ghee. A ring of wheat flour dough is formed around each eye-socket, and warm, melted ghee is spooned onto each eyelid. Then you start to blink, so that the eyeball itself is swimming in the golden ghee. It’s a strange but pleasant feeling, not at all uncomfortable. In theory, at least, the ghee is able to penetrate to the optic nerve and thus nourish the nervous system directly. The other therapy is shirodhara (“head stream”). Here a stream of warm sesame oil is directed at the forehead, in the region of the ‘third eye.’ You simply lie there under the stream, having the seat of your cosmic consciousness tickled with the nourishing oil. Twice during this procedure I’ve slipped into a sort of half-sleep, an almost hypnotic state. When it was over (after a totally indeterminate length of time) I found my arms tingling pleasantly and my face completely relaxed of its usual patterns of expression or stress. I’m sure shirodhara works wonders in insomnia cases, amongst other neuro/psychological disorders, and I can’t think of a more blissful treatment. As long as you don’t mind a head soaked with oil.

The way Panchakarma is practiced these days, it’s essentially a retreat from the world and into oneself. As such it’s an activity necessarily limited to those who have the means to opt out of the workaday world for weeks at a time and be cared for, cooked for, rubbed and riled and retched. Here in Nepal, virtually everyone receiving Panchakarma is a foreigner; in Kerala (the coastal Southwest Indian state), it’s the explicit purpose of much tourism. But despite its touristic incarnation, the treatments themselves go back some few thousand years to the time of Caraka, the legendary physician who lends his name to the oldest extant complete Ayurvedic treatise, the Caraka Samhita. It’s nice to know that hundreds of generations of guinea-pigs have gone before. Where do people get off talking about the need to test traditional methods for safety and efficacy . . .?

My experience so far is like a cross between a stay at a sanatorium and an artist colony. Besides my treatments, I do little other than eat, sleep, take short walks, and read and write. In the mornings I attend to my meditation and yoga practice, and when I need some company besides books I stop in at a local house, accept a glass of fresh milk or some newly-dug potatoes to take home, chat with an old Newari woman sitting on her step, slowly sorting baby mustard greens. Roots and stems for the goats, leafy bits for gundruk (a way of preserving greens involving first fermentation and then sun-drying). To augment my simple diet I might walk a little further, to a virgin patch of golden Himalayan raspberries where I can gorge myself in splendid isolation.
Sipadole is really a village, sleepy as they come, so anywhere I go I make more of splash than I’d like. But after the first week, now, the families along my wandering routes have gotten used to me. Some of the kids have worked up the nerve to approach and talk to me instead of shouting at me after I pass. Fed up with the manners of some of these I wrote these lines one day after returning to my room:

so what if I like the trees here
better than the children?
bands of tiny hooligans
versus gnarled, majestic sentinels
pipals sprouting leaflets pink and translucent
as grapeskins—no contest. The kids kick dust
shout ‘hallo’s and satirical ‘namashtay’s at your back
beg for rupees, chocolate, a pen.
trees ask for nothing but your exhalation
though they’ll suck up your minerals in the end
turn your bones into bark and root
for the kids to clamber on
worship with grubby feet.
later, grown, they’ll honor you
with rice grains and vermillion
deck you out with mirrors
make a temple of your trunk.
everything and nothing is sacred.
just ask the schoolboys at the burning ghat
watching porn on a cellphone screen
while their friends mother, a suicide,
incinerates atop her pyre
of silent wood.

That last image borrowed from Alden, who witnessed such a scene at a cremation.
From panchakarma to pickpockets—I’m amazed at humanity all over again. Maanche ta je pani garcha . . . people will do just about anything. Everything. Selah.

Contemplating Collapse

I wanted to put this reward at the end of my rant . . . a Pipal tree (an incarnation of Vishnu) in Calcutta

"The connection between the inability to goose up oil production beyond some already icecap-melting number, and the immediate trotting out of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, is not immediately obvious. But apparently the U.S. economy is a sort of pyramid scheme, based on nothing more than faith in its growth potential, and can only continue to exist while it continues to expand, by sucking in ever more resources, particularly energy. Even a small energy shortage is enough to undermine it. So Peak Oil is hardly the problem – it is the foolish notion that infinite economic growth on a finite planet is possible. Collapse can be triggered when any one of many other physical limits is exceeded - drinkable water, breathable air, arable land, and so on – and so the limit to sustained oil production is only one of many physical limits to growth."

- Dmitri Orlov http://cluborlov.blogspot.com


Often I think people miss an obvious point when discussing sustainability: if a particular practice or society or anything is unsustainable, that means by definition that it can’t continue forever. Sooner or later the shift to sustainable practices will happen in the way a pot that’s boiling over will settle down to a lower level of liquid. It would be nice to make some of the changes consciously, however. We can at least try to slow down instead of keeping our foot on the accelerator as the brick wall approaches (and—good timing—as we run of gas). It would be nice to have some soup left in the pot once we manage to turn off the flame. We can limit the damage and ease the transition to the sort of lifestyles we will have to live in a world where oil is no longer cheap and plentiful and our sprawling suburban communities with their tidy, barren front lawns is no longer feasible. Where there is not enough water to go around. Where credit is worthless, and wealth is increasingly measured in useful, tangible goods and services.
As the collapse-prophet James Howard Kunstler has written on his popular doomsday blog “Clusterfuck Nation,” (http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com)it is president Obama’s task to first recognize our predicament and then to act accordingly: to mobilize the country to build new, smaller-scale systems that work in place of the large and failing ones now teetering awfully close to the brink. How depressingly ironic that for all his talk of change, so far Obama is scrambling to prop up the tattered canvas of the status quo against the howling winds of change. Obama and Americans in general are justifiably scared of change, now that it’s clear that we’re facing changes we can’t control. Who wants to stand up in front of the nation and explain that the era of America as we know it, of rampant consumption and credit card debt, is in its death throws? That we can’t live the lifestyles we’ve become accustomed to any more, can’t live in gated communities and depend on cheap fuel to drive to work everyday and expect cheap food to be there on the supermarket shelves at the end of the day.
But as many (including Noam Chomsky and the beautiful Ms. Waverly Lutz) have pointed out, Obama is not a mass movement. What he’s beginning to look like is the face of a highly successful mass marketing campaign engineered to sell us more of the same in a revolutionary new package.
We all want to like him—we voted for him, didn’t we?—but all his intelligence and eloquence and the good intentions I’m still willing to credit him with add up to nothing in the face of the machine in which the president is a rather small (though highly visible) cog. I’m talking about global capitalism and the corporate and financial mafia that enforce it. . . the ideology that’s doing an astoundingly efficient job of consuming the world.

‘So what, in the context of this madness, does life look like on the ground in Nepal these days?’ perhaps you ask. Well.

The capital, Kathmandu, has all but gone dry under the pressures of expanding population and sub-normal rainfall. At the public taps throughout the city, steady streams have turned into trickles or stopped altogether. People line up at the still-running taps for hours, their empty water containers snaking out into the streets.
Ever since the Koshi flood calamity in the Terai there’s been a power shortage, but now that problem too is reaching absurd proportions. There’s power for about 6 hours out of 24, businesses are folding left and right, industry is crippled. Intermittently, severe cooking gas and petrol shortages crop up, and auto fuel when available is notoriously mixed with foul-burning kerosene. (I’ll refrain here from getting into the corruption and dysfunctionality of Nepali politics.)
The city is clogged by traffic and the whole valley brimming with smog from all the cars and the burgeoning brick factories. The last rural parts of the valley are filling in with unplanned sprawl, as land prices shoot through the roof and more and more traditional farmers decide to sell their plots. In short, Kathmandu is looking more and more like Los Angeles.

And yet Kathmandu continues to grow. There is money to be made here, and things to spend the money on. More than any other it is this fact--Kathmandu’s involvement in the global economy--that keeps attracting young people from the countryside. This is the paradox, for as the city grows and the traditional urban centers meld into an endless suburban mess, one would expect Nepali village life to look more and more appealing to those who have roots outside the Valley. The beloved gaon (village), subject of so many folk songs, where the rhododendrons bloom and water flows clear. The gaon, where Maoist thugs create terror and set precedents of violent grab-what-you-can politics, where food security is marginal at best and public health issues abound. At its heart, perhaps the real issue is lack of access to the global economy and the standard of living that goes with it. Most rural Nepalis don’t live within easy access of a motorable road, let alone a hospital or college. While fifty years these would have been non-issues, today the West looms so large in people’s minds that traditional values are largely skewed. Village elders may cling to the old ways of living, but in most rural communities the chances are high that anyone under 30 desperately wants a one-way ticket out. Kathmandu is the portal to the outer world of boundless economic opportunity. Who, having escaped the dead-end drudgery of village and reached the promised land, is willing to return? It seems the village everywhere is a site first to be escaped and then nostalgically longed for.

The examples I mentioned, access to modern healthcare and higher education, are tricky issues: as a highly privileged American I can’t very well waltz into a village and say, ‘You guys don’t need higher education or modern healthcare! Keep going to the local shaman/herbalist! What do you want to study economics or English for?’ (Post)modernity has arrived, and simply shutting the doors on it is not an option. And yet these institutions are not necessarily the essential foundations of ‘civilized society’ that we tend to take them for. A great deal of the hardship of village life these days has to do with the manpower and brain-drain currently afflicting it; in times past, I imagine, intact communities were much better able to make do with their local resources their economies. Somehow or other, Nepal, like developed and developing countries worldwide, needs to find ways to revitalize its countless villages and small towns, where lifestyles that tread lightly on the earth are the norm and regional self-determination possible.

In any case, it looks like Nepal and other parts of the so-called “third-world” are facing the issues that the rest of the world can’t avoid for much longer. The difference is that here there is little insulation against reality: no insurance companies to absorb the shock of a bad fire or a drought, no self-interested corporations willing and able to provide (say) a desert like Arizona or Vegas or LA with water while aquifers dry up. If there’s not enough water to go around, people will know it instantly. The distance between action and reaction is simply shorter here, with fewer complex systems to create illusions of abundance while hidden costs pile up. This connection to reality means that Nepal, for all its tribulations, will never be able to swing itself as far out of line as the West has. With our recipe of neoliberal ideology, our celebrated work ethic, and financial voodoo that I will never fully understand, we in America have managed to build a teetering edifice, glory of the world, on a porous, shifty foundation. Nepal may never presume to reach so high, but it sure has less of a ways to fall. Of course there’s one glaring exception: Kathmandu, which as I implied is vulnerable to collapse in the same way Los Angeles is. Two generations ago the valley was all but self-sufficient in food and construction materials, with supplementation coming primarily with trade (e.g. in salt) with Tibet. Today its hyper-condensed, largely landless population is subject to shortages of essentials every time a bandh closes the few roads leading to and from the valley. There’s another reason Kathmandu is a ticking time bomb: it sits on a major tectonic faultline. The last time a major earthquake hit, in 1934, damage was severe, but at that time there was no concrete jungle.

How to close such a gloomy entry? First by saying that this kind of bitter medicine is essential to wake us up and mobilize us so we can start finding sustainable solutions before they are forced on us. That’s not much consolation, maybe. What we need here are stories, visions of a brighter future to raise our spirits and give us something to strive towards. Well I’m no bard. But check out Ursula LeGuin's novel Always Coming Home for some of that good old-time inspiration. If no one protests I might even post more about this remarkable book, ‘cause it too is good medicine for our times.

Shave and a Haircut

I wrote this light little piece before my trip to India and might as well post it 'cause my next one is probably going to be something heavy about the state of Nepal and the world, with all the juicy stuff I've avoided 'til now but that's filling my head past the point where I can ignore it. So enjoy the trip to the barbershop!

[Oh, and I've twiddled the blog settings so that anyone can post comments without having to be a member of blogger or what-have-you. So by all means feed me some comments, hit me with questions, critiques, exclamations.]


There’s something universal about a barber shop—the loose camaraderie of men at leisure, the talk of sports, the hair on the floor. This basic template lends itself to hundreds of forms worldwide, probably, and the local “saloons” near my rented flat in Kathmandu are ever so Southasian: everything from the color of the walls (turquoise), the cricket game on the small color TV, the mullets coiffed. The barbershop I most frequent is manned by a few men (relatives?) from the Terai, the strip of southern Nepal plains that has as much in common with North India as with hill Nepal. The shop manages to preserve something of the lackadaisical feel of the great Gangetic plain. So I don’t go often, only when I have time on my hands. Anyway, the barbershop experience can’t be rushed. I wait for a nice lazy weekend morning when I have a few days of stubble and a big dusty mop of hair. Then I settle in.
The haircuts are nothing too special, just good old-fashioned barbering with scissors and a comb. A little more party in the back than I’d like, but these guys have their methods and just try convincing them to take another inch off back there. ‘Oh no, it’ll stand up, I can’t do that. This is as short is at can go, see, I tried.’ ‘Oh I see. Yes, a mullet is most necessary. Please proceed.’ The shave, though, will put a smile and a grimace on your face. It starts with a thorough face-spritzing with a pump-pressure spritzer, a dab of Dettol shaving cream, and a thorough and vigorous lathering with a shaving brush. Out comes the straight razor and a new blade, and a few short, expert scrapes later you’re clean. Repeat for baby smoothness. All the while the barber cleans his blade on the blade of his hand, transferring the whiskery foam to a scrap of newspaper periodically. The hands work with confidence, and you have little chance to pause and reflect that this razor could slice through your carotid artery like a hot knife through butter if this barber caught a notion. Wasn’t there some South American short story about assassinating a political figure that way. . . ? But he’s toweling off the remaining foam and move to the next phase, the facewash--but not before a once-over with pitkiri, a translucent chunk of some sour and astringent mineral salt not to be confused with sodium chloride. Wetted, it’s smoothed-side glides over your face with a slight sting, leaving a fresh and tightening sensation in its wake. Enter now cosmetic product #2, something called ‘cleansing milk.’ Here the barber shows off some chops, the way he slaps and jiggles your cheeks. This is an intimate process, and you are putty in his hands: the silky milky cleanser is all over your face, even your eyelids, and the man’s fingers caress every curve of your physiognomy. Without wiping it off, he proceeds to the next application. I open my eyes, hazarding a milky sting, to see what exactly I was about to be lathered with: an ‘apricot scrub’ exfoliant mixed in the palm of the barber’s hand with—nice touch--sprinkle of rose water (clearly this tradition evolved in a hot country). This is applied a little more vigorously, with lots of shaking and rubbing. The eyelid flutter amazes. To remove the residue of cleanser, out comes a taut length of string, with twangs of which he swipes the lather off the planes of your cheeks and forehead into little lines, like the piles of dust you create while sweeping. A spongy pad takes care of the rest. Phase 3: an application of foundation (what? On such freshly-cleaned pores?) combined with fairness cream (for men of course). The foundation I graciously decline, not being one for make-up or the weird grayish-pink opacity that it confers. He insists on the fairness cream, however strange it might seem want to make this white skin whiter. I’d finally earned my stinging, satisfying application of aftershave . . .
Now, I had planned to turn down the massage. It’s just a little . . . intense. But once the barber starts his scalp treatment I can’t find the words to stop him. I think, ‘let him do my head and shoulders.’ Before long he’s broken out the counter cushion and I’m leaning forward, head down, while he worked my back over. Fingers like spider legs, poking and prodding quickly and with precision around shoulderblades. Palms pushing transverse to the elongated spine, flexing it, as if testing its springiness in the lumbar and dorsal regions. Too many practiced motions to count, even if I weren’t too mesmerized to remember them all. With me sitting upright again, he begins a series of crack-the-egg-on-your head moves that feel strangely wonderful. My world momentarily a series of flashes, comforting pressures on the plates of my skull. Then he’s working down each arm from the shoulder, twisting as he goes so the palm is upward, then giving a little hand massage before cracking each finger joint with a swift tug. We’re into the last phase, this means, the crackings. My own hands clasped behind my head like someone in a hammock, he braces on my arm and mercilessly twists, cranks my spine around like a corkscrew, going for a pop of every vertebral joint. There are other indescribable maneuvers, incredible contortions on both our parts resulting in releases of heretofore unknown tension in joints I didn’t know I had. He pulls me against the back of the chair and jerks my upper body up and back, cracking my spine, then moves onto the neck. Two quick motions, left-jerk right-jerk, and crrrick-crack, it’s done, this strangely sensuous experience. I’ve been sitting for over an hour. I pay my 150 rupees, always a matter of negotiation and I know I’m paying too much, but I can’t argue with this guy. The skill, the attention . . . the eyelid caresses and makeup and the mullet. The experience is priceless, really. I step out into the Sunday sun, contemplating a cup of chiya, a little dazed but looking and smelling like a Bollywood hero.

The main purpose of this entry is to post a transcript of a short talk I just gave at the regional Fulbright conference in Kolkata. It's on Ayurved, surprise surprise. See below if you want to cut to the chase. But since I'm stuck here in Siliguri on the edge of the Hills for another few hours due to a transportation bandh, I might as well do some rambling. That's what blogs are for, right?

So, rambling on . . . I've just had my first real taste of India. Technically I lived in India for almost 5 months in 2004, but that was Kalimpong, in Darjeeling District, in the hills. It's an area that (as Nepalis love to point out) was once part of Nepal and is still populated almost entirely by Nepali-speakers. Hence the bandh: these "gorkhas" as they call themselves (since they're not, after all, Nepali a citizenship sense) are staging a protest and demanding their own state, to be called 'Gorkhaland.' The movement began in the late eighties with ugly consequences and few tangible gains for any but the movement leaders, but it seems now the next generation wants to take a crack at the cause. The activists/agitators feel with some justification that they have little in common with the rest of West Bengal, the state that now extends a lanky limb of land from its base in Sundarban mangrove jungles flush against the Bay of Bengal and the megalopolis of Kolkata (once Calcutta) to reach up and cradle the rich Timber, Tea and Tourism resources of its hill region. If West Bengal is an elephant's head (I'm not in fact looking at a map at the moment), then Darjeeling district is the covered chafing dish supported by the beast's upwardly-extended trunk, a narrow spit of land more technically known (I've just been informed) as the "chicken's neck." I'll stick to large and majestic mammals, thanks. It's a contradiction, if I may speak for the Gorkhas, that the plate of delights and the hungry elephant should be lumped together without regard for their peculiar relationship. That Bengali elephant is hungry, everyone knows it. But India (and Nepal) is full of such contradictions. If every politically disenfranchised, culturally-marginalized, or linguistically-isolated group in the subcontinent had their own state . . .

I'm (as of 11 March) in Siliguri, as I said, right at the juncture between the elephantine nostrils and the sterling tray. I'll be here until the bandh clears up, which may or may not be as early as 6 AM tomorrow. Last night I was on a train running like an artery up through the snout: the Darjeeling Mail, my first bona fide Indian train, but already I feel like an old hand. India, this part anyway, feels only halfway-foreign after almost 11 combined months in the Darjeeling hills and Kathmandu. If the Nepali language has become a nearly transparent pane for me by now, barely interposing any noticeable structure between words and meaning, then the related north Indian lingua franca of Hindi is growing translucent. Numbers, days of the weeks are all the same as in Nepali, and the most useful linguistic knowledge here is simply knowing which English words work in the Indian context.

Yesterday I woke up in Kolkata, a city that makes commercial Siliguri's half-million look sleepy and provincial. But two mornings ago I woke up in the Sundarban, the largest mess of mangroves in the world. It's a labyrinth of inhopsitable islands where the Ganges and dozens of other rivers finally meet the sea, and it's known for its man-eating Royal Bengal Tigers, but the India side alone (and two-thirds of the Sundarban falls in Bangladesh) is home to over four million people. They live on the clay-soil, flood-prone islands of the region, cultivating rice in fields reclaimed from the mangroves and fishing. They are notoriously battered by cyclones and tortured by the tigers who pick off not just their livestock but people too, like the honey-hunters who steal through the islands of the Preserve to forage their thin, heady honey. They wear masks on the backs of their heads since tigers like to attack from behind. Like much of India, the region is home to a mix of Hindus and Muslims. Unlike in many places, though, in the Sundarban it's hard to tell the difference. Faced with common hardship, the village dwellers have evolved a culture with more in common than apart. Hindu and Mussalman alike worship Ban Bibi, the goddess of the forest, and the various deities associated with the dreaded and revered tiger. Hindu and Muslim alike lead lives that, from a passing ferry or rickshaw, look laborious yet lazily-paced. The landscape is brutal but lush--banana trees and rice paddy and fish ponds--water plentiful in this month.

I was there on an unabashed (well, slightly abashed) tourist mission. I wanted to see this region, to get on a boat and cruise its brackish waterways, see the villages, taste some local food and honey, watch the wildlife. Daydream about the hundreds of tigers that prowl the vastness even if I couldn't see them. And that's exactly what I did for a long, hot, sunburnt day--sandwiched between two days of intensive traveling from/to Kolkata by Bus, Tuk-Tuk, Ferry, rickshaw, and (smaller) Ferry.
All day long the guide tirelessly explained some of the nuances of the unique estuary ecosystem, pointed out black-capped kingfishers and greater egrets and, once, a set of tiger pugmarks in the tidal muck of a mangrove island. Other than that there was no sign of the big felines, but I thought I could feel the tension I've read about that only the presence of a top-of-the-food-chain predator can create. All life wary, silence thick.
After the second night under a mosquito net and the same vehicle sequence in reverse, I found myself back briefly in the equally hot, teeming, ineffable jungle of Kolkata. Some of the hardship of the Sundarbans life comes from human life there being so strictly circumscribed: by the shark and crocodile-infested water, by the threat of the tiger, by the fickleness of the monsoon rains. In Kolkata humanity knows no such bounds, it seems: life and its gritty, grotty accoutrements spill out in every direction, composing a city too big to know or tell. If my quintessential memories of the Sundarbans are of static, hazy green islands lying flat against grey-green water, my memory of Kolkata is buzzing still with the infinite variety of impressions that city bombards you with: a tiny tea shop no more than 2.5' x 2.5' x 3', proprietor crouching inside and making his tea on a charcoal burner on the sidewalk outside; an entire district of typewriter-wallahs copying (forging?)documents along a busy street; legions of street food vendors, and piles of sumptuous flesh-toned sweets; a cavernous communist coffeehouse vibrating with caffeinated nerves, paint fumes and animated conversation. literally hundreds of book stalls lining college street, a city of books. a muslim lane, butchered cow brains quivering in piles, a small mosque every fifty or hundred yards. mosaiced walls. men, mostly men in lungis, on rickshaws, in suits or in almost nothing, walking, squatting, standing, moving through this vibrant labyrinth of a city.

(Ramble off)

Presentation to Fulbright Conference

(To fit my 10-min timeslot I ended up having to cut about a third of what's printed below)


I was going to start by saying that I don’t want to fall into the trap of trying to define Ayurveda in only 10 minutes, and then I remembered that the Carak Samhita, the oldest complete Ayurvedic text, presents a nice compact Sanskrit definition in the form of a sutra. It goes “hitahitam sukham dukham ayus tasya hitahitam. Maanam [duration] ca tacca yatroktam ayurveda sa ucyate:” roughly, “Ayurveda is that which describes what is useful and not useful for promoting a healthy life.” The word Ayurveda itself is Sanskrit for “knowledge of life,” and the tradition includes everything under the sun pertaining to life and its propagation, maintenance, and extension.
Just continuing for a moment with the 2-minute crash course introduction to Ayurveda, if you take the Carak Samhita and flip it open, you might find material on anything from info on what food and daily routine are appropriate for the season of late spring; instructions for Panca Karma, a bodily purification regimen; care of children up to the critical age of 7 years; classification of plants and animals according to their properties; countless herbal formulas, or how to prepare an enema apparatus from an animal bladder and a piece of reed. Later texts include lengthy sections on surgical technique (still first millennium CE) and, quite a bit later, alchemical recipes using mercury preparations for purposes of rejuvenation. Since many of you may be familiar with Ayurveda through yoga, I want to note that the inclusion into the Ayurvedic tradition of Ashtanga yoga (including not just asana pranayama, dhyan or meditation, etc. in pursuit of samadhi) is a comparatively recent development. In other words, until quite recently yoga was practiced for its own sake, i.e. as a means of liberation, and not specifically as a way of attaining health on this plane.
So Ayurveda is ‘knowledge of life,’ and everything pertaining to it. As such, and as a product of a particular civilization and period of history, it is also impossible to disentangle completely from other fields such as religion and Jyotish (astrology). This all-encompassing quality of Ayurveda, its lack of segregation from other areas of knowledge, is precisely what makes Ayurveda so powerful on the one hand—and so powerfully appealing to a Western crowd hungry for holistic traditions and the spiritual promise they hold--and so difficult for modern science to come to grips with on the other. I’ll just note in passing that one problem with trying to conduct clinical research on Ayurveda is that Ayurved recognizes and gives a good deal of importance to intangible, unquantifiable things like an individual’s constitution as determined by the qualities their pulse, and the presence of prana, a sort of vital breath analogous to the Chinese qi. In effect Ayurved recognizes so many variables that the hope of performing a controlled experiment becomes a pipe-dream
So, no surprise, there are fundamental incompatibilities between modern science and classical Ayurveda. How various parties navigate these differences has been one of the themes of my work so far.

Just a couple words about myself before I get into my work so far. . . like many Americans I got into Ayurveda through English-language books by the likes of Robert Svoboda and Vasant Lad (both Vaidyas whom I have a great deal of respect for). These books tend to present Ayurveda as a system of “self-healing,” to quote one of Dr. Lad’s titles, and this is partly because the legal climate in the US means that Ayurved can’t claim its proper status as a medical system complete with actual doctors. As Jean Langford has observed in her book Fluent Bodies, self-healing is a short step from self-help: Ayurveda is growing in popularity in the US as a path to self-improvement and even to greater individuation, which as Langford points out is a unique goal of holistic health movements in the West.
I spent last year studying at Dr. Lad’s Ayurvedic Institute in New Mexico, where the emphasis is on becoming a lifestyle consultant and educator about how to improve one’s physical, mental and spiritual health through Ayurved. I learned a great deal there but it did not exactly prepare me for the sheer diversity of forms that Ayurveda takes in its native Southasian context. I spent the first few months of my Fulbright mostly on surveying this diversity and trying to make sense of it. Without oversimplifying too much, a few broad types of Ayurveda can be delineated using botanical language. The first is the heirloom varieties, the so-called traditional Vaidyas who learn both from texts and orally and never attend a government institution. I won’t have much to say about them today, but ask me in 5 months. Then there are the graduates of the Ayurveda College at Tribhuvan University, whom I mostly think of as vigorous hybrid cultivars. We’ll get to them in a minute. Then there are the new shoots from old roots, to borrow a metaphor from Robert Svoboda. These are the new incarnations of Ayurved that have sprung up in fertile soil in the West. This is the kind of Ayurved I was exposed to and that still informs my own perspective to a large degree. Whereas in the States, Ayurveda’s perceived promise of spiritual self-improvement often seems to trump the merely medical.of Ayurveda, in Nepal Ayurved is still primarily concerned with preventing and treating illness, i.e. with medicine, If Ayurved on the ground in Nepal looks less than glamorous to a Westerner expecting salvation or at least some insight into his or her own being, let him consider that the local culture has other branches for dealing with those sorts of concerns. Ayurveda may be deeply connected to philosophy and religion, but in its home context it has the luxury of being able to specialize in medicine.
It’s noteworthy that there are a few places in Nepal that purvey this kind the personalized, self-realization brand of Ayurveda that is growing so fast in America. But they are the places that cater to largely to foreigners and upwardly-mobile, westward-looking Nepalis.

Now onto the Ayurveda that I’ve dubbed “hybrid.” This kind of Ayurveda is associated with institutions like Naradevi hospital, the official government Ayurveda hospital in Kathmandu. I’d like to describe briefly what I saw over the course of my observation sessions there, because I think it’s representative of a new and pivotal chapter in Ayurveda’s history.
Naradevi has a public Outpatient Department clinic that also serves as an interning opportunity for students in their final year of training. Every Monday and Thursday people gather in the courtyard and wait to see the senior physician, Dr. D.B. Roka, or one of his team of interns. The clinical model is strikingly Western in many ways. Consultations are quick, for one, since there are so many patients to get through in a few short hours. The doctors and wear white coats and stethoscopes around their necks, and order blood tests and X-rays as necessary. I wasn’t surprised to see that taking of blood pressure is routine, but I was surprised to see that the traditional practice of reading the patient’s pulse is not. The patient consultations happen in Nepali but the diagnosis is in allopathic English, sometimes with the equivalent Sanskrit term glossed by Dr. Roka.
If Langford’s book is a reliable indicator, the biomedical style of Naradevi’s OPD is typical of the Ayurveda practiced in most of India’s institutional settings as well. The pattern as she describes it is “while in the classroom students cram Ayurvedic theory, on the hospital wards they learn primarily which Ayurvedic drugs to prescribe for which biomedical disease categories” (127). And actually, at Naradevi antibiotics and anti-worm medications are routinely used in addition to classical Ayurvedic formulas and modern Ayurvedic patent medicines. Even when herbs are used at Naradevi, they are cited in pseudo-biomedical jargon for their “immunomodulatory effect” (guduchi) or for being an “herbal antibiotic,” and never in the classical terms of rasa virya vipak and prabhav.
Anyway, after a few sessions of observing this pattern in the OPD room again and again, I was beginning to despair of any substantial traces of Ayurvedic thinking or language when it came to understanding a patient’s case. Then an older man came in, complaining of shifting pains in his extremities. The intern on duty, unable to pinpoint any biomedical disease category, nevertheless recognized that the patient’s complaints fit under the Ayurvedic heading of a Vata disorder. (Vata or “wind” is the dry, cold, mobile humor associated with old age, degeneration, pain and stiffness amongst a universe of other resonances.) Thus a diagnosis was possible, albeit a vague one: Vata Vyadhi, increased Vata, read the entry in the log book. His treatment consisted of ashwagandha powder, a nourishing herb that soothes aggravated Vata and strengthens Vata-affected tissues (dhatus). The episode proved to me that Ayurvedic theory is there at the Naradevi OPD, waiting in the shadows like a dusty, disused tool for its moment. For the doctor and his interns, however, the tools of allopathy gleam and glitter with the legitimacy of capital-S Science and it’s no surprise that those allopathic tools are the ones they reach for first. Of course the doctors are the first ones to point out that it is the patients too who demand the easy-to-take pills and syrups that patent and allopathic drugs provide, preferring them over Ayurveda’s messy powders and bitter-tasting tablets.
The hybridization or fusion of Ayurved with biomedicine is visible in more ways than the processes of diagnosis and treatment. At the end of every OPD session the office is flooded with drug reps from the patent medicine companies peddling their products and handing out free samples. Some of the very structure of the biomedical industry has taken hold in an ostensibly Ayurvedic zone. Looking at the products these companies are pushing is an extremely interesting exercise: there’s not much time to get into it but basically they are modern-looking syrups and capsules made with Ayurvedic herbs and marketed in a way that both looks to modern science for legitimacy (in that they refer to clinical trials etc. and use allopathic language) and claim to remedy such ills of modernity as toxins in the air, food and the water supply.
There’s plenty more to say but I’m about out of time. I’d like to wrap up by milking this comparison of this allopathy-heavy brand of Ayurved to a hybrid cultivar just a little more: like hybrid plants, the Ayurveda practiced at Naradevi is vigorous, but like hybrids, it is unlikely to “come true” from seed. When you plant the seed of a hybrid tomato the tomato you get will look nothing like the one you got the seed from. An allopathy-ayurved hybrid is likely to be equally unstable, and already the strain seems to be reverting to the tendencies of its allopathic side.
As in farming, here too genetic diversity is crucial. The hybrids are bearing fruit, but in the march of progress we had better remember the trusted older varieties as well.